Posts Tagged ‘Scotland’

By Dr Emilia Crighton, chair of the Scottish committee of the Faculty of Public Health.

So the government has decided to bring in a ban on pub and club drinking promotions that encourage people to drink fast and furiously. Licensees will face fines of up to £20,000 or face a prison sentence, under this new tougher code of practice.

This is definitely a step forward in attempting to tackle a British drinking culture that encourages people to see drinking large volumes of alcohol as an achievement to crow about to friends, rather than a threat to their health.

The introduction of the mandatory code of practice banning irresponsible promotions; the need for age verification policies; and ensuring smaller measures are available, acknowledges the failure of the voluntary arrangements that have been in place until now.

Making pub and clubs offer free tap water to customers, from April, should also be welcomed. Drinking water could help drinkers slow their consumption of alcohol and tackle dehydration.

As the FPH has regularly argued, alcohol consumption in the UK has doubled over the last 40 years and the average consumption of alcohol in the population is directly linked to the amount of harm. Increases in alcohol consumption have been driven by an increase in off sales, which now represents around 51% of alcohol volume sales, up from 24% in 1980. Consumption is strongly linked to affordability: as price has fallen, consumption has risen. Alcohol is now 69% more affordable than thirty years ago. The increased affordability of alcohol has been driven by the off sales sector.

Tackling price and availability are the most effective alcohol policies aimed at reducing alcohol related harm. Research produced by the team at Sheffield University which modelled the effect of different levels of minimum pricing on alcohol consumption indicates increasing impact on consumption with increases in price. For example the introduction of a minimum price of 40 pence per unit in Scotland would have a very small effect on consumption (-2.7 per cent), while at 50 pence and 60 pence, there would be significant changes in consumption (-7.2 per cent and 12.9 per cent respectively). The higher the price, the lower the consumption, and the lower the harm caused by drinking.

However, the government needs to go further. The introduction of a minimum price per unit of alcohol sold will have the highest financial impact on harmful drinkers. People who drink within the sensible drinking guidelines will hardly be financially affected. For example, if a 40p minimum price was introduced, it is estimated that a moderate drinker’s spend on alcohol would go up by £11 per year (21p per week), but that of a harmful drinker, who tends to buy more, cheap alcohol, would go up by £137. The increased prices in alcohol could be offset by lower prices for food and non alcoholic drinks by the supermarkets.

It could have been a big day for public health in Scotland. It could have been the day when notice was served on Scotland’s ugliest health blight – its rising tide of binge drinking, drunkenness and alcohol-related illness and injury.

On Thursday this week, Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon introduced the Alcohol etc (Scotland) Bill – a raft of proposals including further restrictions on drink promotions, powers to raise the legal purchasing age to 21 and, most controversially, mandatory minimum pricing to banish all those special offers of ultra-cheap drink at ‘pocket-money prices’ lining supermarket shelves

Everyone knows Scotland has the worst alcohol problem in the UK, indeed in most of Europe. We’ve seen its alcohol-related death rates doubling in the last 15 years, and alcohol-related liver disease rising faster than almost anywhere in the world.

Drink now kills about one person in 20 in Scotland and costs the country at least £2.25 billion in extra services and lost productivity. This toll is nothing less than shocking and amounts to a huge public health crisis that demands to be tackled with steady determination.

The SNP-led Scottish Government’s Alcohol Bill looked set to do just that until it came up against the combined machinations of party politics and the drinks trade.

Just hours before the Bill was launched, the Scottish Labour Party finally decided to join the Tories and Lib-Dems in declaring themselves opposed to the minimum pricing proposal. Unless deals can be done and sensible compromises reached, this element of the Bill will fail, knocking a great hole in the new legislation.

Needless to say this is all a massive disappointment to the supporters of minimum pricing, including all four UK Chief Medical Officers, the Royal Colleges of Nursing, Physicians, Surgeons and GPs, the UK Faculty of Public Health, the BMA, the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland and even the Scottish Licensed Trade Association.

We at the FPH have done all we can to bring the arguments to bear, and at our recent Scottish conference have pointed out the potential gains in health, wellbeing and lives saved if the minimum price were set at various levels. Alcohol consumption is closely associated with price – and the higher the minimum is set, the more it would deter heavy drinking. But too high a price would be punitive for the great majority who drink moderately and sensibly – and could encourage crime and smuggling – so a compromise would have to be reached through rational, informed debate.

I hope that the Scottish Parliamentary process will allow such debate to take place. I hope that Labour’s newly declared position is tactical and that they will at least offer enough support to the minority SNP government to permit proper discussion. Their current argument that minority pricing is ‘probably illegal’ under EU law seems very weak when stacked up against the hugely pressing social and humanitarian issue that heavy drinking in Scotland has undoubtedly become.

This week could have seen a major step being taken on the way to better health for the people of Scotland. Despite the latest setback, perhaps it still can be.

Let us have the debate – and let us see if, once again, Scotland can set an example to the rest of the UK by taking a strong, brave and decisive step for public health.

Disclaimer

The aim of this blog is to encourage discussion and debate on public health issues. The views expressed here are the personal views of authors, and the content does not reflect the official position of the Faculty of Public Health. However, discussion generated here may be used to influence the development of organisational policy.